Sunday, April 7, 2013

MicroNodeAppliance - an ultra light Linux VM with NodeJS

Some time ago, I wanted to run a virtual web server on a machine with not enough storage to hold another complete OS.

I decided to aim at the smallest possible Linux distribution, and I found MicroCore, a ~8MB system at the base of TinyCore. Beautiful! I created a starting environment following this guide, and then installed NodeJS.

There are pros and cons in using this solution:

Pros:

~29MB VM image size

Boots in a few of seconds

Can create many VMs in the same machine before running out of memory

It runs in memory, so if you break something just reboot to revert to the last state (see cons)

CLI only

Cons:

It runs in memory, so a script must be run to persist the changes to the storage (see pros, if you haven't already done it!)

Not recommended for beginners

I wonder how would it perform if mounted on the instances of a distributed system!

4 comments:

Hi Volodymyr, sorry for the delay.To persist changes to disk you can either use the backup command (which will ask for confirmation) or run filetool.sh -b.Keep in mind that only some folders are saved with the backup process. The list can be found in the file /opt/.filetool.lst and you can extend it as needed.